[Mark Suszko]

Greg, this is only my own opinion now, and your complete honesty with the client is commendable, but there is such a thing as “too much information”. Some wags here will point to one (OK, any) of my posts and say “Amen to that!”.:-)

When you put literally every last item down on the bill in detail, I find that troublesome people or grinder wannabees will start to question these items point by point in an effort to whittle down your price. They’ll say things like: “Oh, I can get the blank DVD’s cheaper than that.” And then they will start to insist you switch out suppliers, or carve the equivalent savings out of your profit margin. This is a death by a thousand cuts. It can affect how you do the program, when they balk at a certain expense line for say a dolly, crane rental, special lens, whatever, that you built the bid with. Pull the expensive item because it “looks” extravagant or unnecessary to some bean-counter, and suddenly, your video looks different than what you promised initially: Instead of dolly moves, you have to pull zooms. Instead of a prompter, you use cue cards and get a bad eye line. Instead of a steadicam, you have to increase post time to motion-stabilize in post. Etc Etc. and pretty soon, your video and your reputation look…. bad. Aren’t they hiring you partly for your expertise and judgement? I’m just saying it can be counter-productive for the chef to reveal all the ingredients.

Sometimes you can counter these folks with statements like “Yes, the dvd blanks cost more: the Taiyo Yuden brand is highly regarded for a better quality level, we’ll get fewer reject disks. I figure that your program about six-sigma and chasing a Deming Prize might tend to be undermined if we publish on Medion spindles from the dollar store that won’t play on your customer’s machines”.

Sometimes you can’t give as good an answer, then you look foolish or incompetent, just for picking stuff you know works.

Moreover, when you break out the costs to this micro-level of detail, Greg, you’re giving away the recipe for your operation to competitors and to people at the client company that want to try and do it themselves. Free research everybody, have a copy! See exactly what my profit margin on this job is, and just where you can under-cut me to beat me out of the next gig, and judge me on my margin, not my results!

I don’t have an MBA but I think this may not be smart business.

You started doing it this way, and now you may be stuck with it, as far as this client. For other clients, new ones, I think I would try to use more general categories and not strip my business so naked. Then you have places to add in additional fees and such for things like paypal and fedex without calling so much attention to them. A place to add some padding to cover the unexpected, and a pad from which you can draw out a discount/ partial refund later if needed. You’ve got to have a couple percentage points of maneuvering room in there somewhere just to be safe, but who’s going to allow it to you if they can see that? Your other alternative is to just increase your personal hourly rate fee to reflect the added costs you’re incurring, but that could also make you look greedy…

Client relationships are like marriages; good communication and honesty is key, but sometimes you skip mentioning a few little things in the interest of day-to-day harmony, like noticing the pretty lady walking her dog. Mention what breed her dog is, you’re safe. Anything else, you’re sleeping on the couch tonight, buddy!:-)

[Mark Suszko]

It is relatively easy if you do the spot backwards. Work building it up from last image to first. Still takes planning of course

[Mark Suszko]

Never done a crowd that big, but I’ve done the white limbo both ways before, for full-body shots, as a chromakey green and using white photog’s paper. Once on the same exact shoot: I did it a second time on white as insurance in case I failed with green. Green worked okay though.

If using real white, you can of course luma-key an even smoother or better white in post. Your potential problem that I see there is, there are much greater chances of problem spots happening in your large group with the white than with the green. More chances to get a flare off somebody’s glasses, or a section of white shirt collar that will need masking off, etc. Plus, color-correcting the white with the people in it forces the people to go along for the ride, color-wise, and you may prefer the flexibility of having them color-adjustable separate from the final white.

The white, if you shoot real white is still not going to be “pure” as the white you create synthetically: you will get slight gradients in that white here and there, which I have found to be a hassle to deal with when layering and cropping. Myself, I’d rather work with clean alpha channels, no matter how they were derived, than to work with camera-grabbed white.

The lighting requirements are not significantly less for one than the other, so no great savings there.

If they walk on white, and it gets dirty, the key is harder to pull in luma IMO than if dirt gets on green.

Once you have the full-body keyed, you can create perfect shadows by just grabbing another copy of that matte, layering it on a lower track, and bending it and filling it with black and adjusting opacity and blur. For people that stand really still, I have also just painted-in a diffuse shadow pinned to their shoes and nobody was the wiser.

I think you’ll have more clean-up and roto to do with camera-grabbed white, personally.

One last thought: you may not need to grab the whole crowd in one take: shooting individuals and small randomized groups may work just as well and be more affordable in terms of smaller space needs thus fewer lights, etc. Depends on the shot and script and your skills, but garbage mattes and cropping do miracles.

[Mark Suszko]

That’s a brutal over-generalization, IMO. You’re tarring all the awards with the same dirty brush. I’ve entered some before, paid my money and NOT won, so it is NOT automatically “buying” an award every time, in my experience. OTOH, you can probably find industry people to claim certain Emmy’s and Oscars have been “bought” over the years as well. Yet we all still yearn for one, such of us as care for awards at all, I mean…

Would I be wary of a new award with no track record and unknown judges, heck yes. If an award has been around over twenty years, with well-known, well-regarded judges attached to it and no horde of video villagers has yet come with flaming torches to run it out of town, then I’d have to say it must have SOME legitimacy to it.

And if you stop to think it through, the folks that run these awards KNOW that the only way to keep the gravy train rolling long-term is if people believe in and respect the way it is run. If you believe in Adam Smith, it is exceptionally counter-productive to the award organization to get caught “selling” awards. Sure, a fly-by night can get away with a rip-off *once*. What does he do the next year, after his name’s been smeared all over the production community by internet?

Now if somebody wants to put up documented evidence of such a case, say for the Telly, let him step forward and present, I’m all eyes. Be wary, sure. But to dismiss ALL of these type of awards without proof is unfair, I say. If you’ve been burned, I’d like to hear your story.

[Mark Suszko]

Excellent posts.

If I could add a little coda, it would be this:

The guy complaining about “fluff” is RIGHT. There are some videos that should not be made. I have at times told clients to their face that while I could produce the video they were asking for, my professional opinion was that video was not the best fit for their actual needs. If you’re asking to tape a guy reading his powerpoint slides to a camera, you don’t need a video of that. I don’t want to take your money to do that; all it does is hurt the reputation of what we do and me for enabling the abuse. Plus, its actually LESS effective an d even counter-productive, if it insults the audience. They can read the slides fine without being read to.

You could email the slides to everybody for no cost and be done with it.

Morley’s book has a lot of great stuff about this issue, a lot of stats and examples, so if you’re looking to hand some skeptic an info-grenade of stats and what-fors, I’d recommend my friend John’s book.

The skeptic that started this thread probably had a bad experience with a video that lacked a focus and a purpose, or was otherwise poorly executed. Bad product is out there, no question. Inexperienced people make bad videos every day, then blame the video for the bad job.

Don’t be afraid to tell a client that you have their best interest at heart when you tell them why the proposal * in its current state* is not going to be effective. Suggest better alternatives, and generally, they will respect your honesty as a craftsman. Of course you need to be exceptionally diplomatic about this, and not everyone is always in a position to question an order, even a bad one. But where you DO have the room to have some input, for the greater success of everyone, don;t you owe it to everyone to explain that video is better for some things and “ancillary” media is better for others. This is part of the job of being a communications professional.

[Mark Suszko]

Generally your first few dealings with any gear renting company would work that way as well, security deposits and holds on credit cards for insurance and such. I would suggest a single credit card just for that purpose alone, and starve your children before you allow that card to ever go bad. Lord knows they’ll starve more if you can’t work because of bad credit. A guy that’s never late can sometimes work something out in an emergency, but a guy with a history of slow pays or bounced checks finds fewer doors open to him when he needs them most. And they may never tell you why they won’t help you; they’ll always be able to say they’re just all booked up, even if they’re not. Unless you can afford to move every twelve months, you need to keep your own professional credit history surgically clean.

Or people may start thinking YOU are a grinder!

[Mark Suszko]

Greg, I would just fold it (paypal fee) into my other operational costs, and not break it out on paper as an expense to the client. Yes, he’s paying for it, it’s just hidden in with any other costs like xeroxes, blank tape, whatever. You’re not eating the cost of blank stock, are you? Surely, you add that in to the bill somewhere. Same for postage or for Fedex, if they don’t want to give you their Fedex account number. Is this any different then?

You can make one guy pay for all of it, or a lot of guys pay for a fraction of it, if they ever use it or not… it is really up to you. Just be consistent about it, is my opinion. If everybody on your client list is paying a little fraction for it, then be as generous in a applying it as you can, I would say, so all will get the benefit if they ever need it some day.

[Mark Suszko]

Stop being a doormat?

Run the VISA as soon as it is signed. Or insist on cash.

I understand that it is often an extra financial burden to get a merchant credit card account so you can process electronically, I think a lot of people doing the smaller jobs are using PayPal, which works like a credit card, in fact can be slaved to your credit card, lets you do instant payments over the web and generate shipping datea as well if you want, but you don’t have the huge fees of merchant accounts.

Some people are down on Paypal after having had a bad experience, but I haven’t had a lick of trouble yet myself. I think for small-budget lone wolf operators it can make a lot of sense if you set it up right. Just one more option in your arsenal.

[Mark Suszko]

That’s because of phase cancellation, the waves are exactly opposite each other and when summed you get nothing or barely anything. If one track gets offset by one frame, you’ll likely notice the audio suddenly come back full force: that’s the proof it was being phase-cancelled. There’s probably a tool somewhere in FCP or Soundtrack to fix that, but I don’t yet know where it is. Somebody here know?

[Mark Suszko]

The local access cable kids in my town tried using a Slingbox as a poor man’s microwave hop to cover the state fair parade. They took a toaster or small panasonic switcher into the field, camped out along the parade route in the front yard of a friend with broadband access, and ran slingbox back to their cable head-end.

Did it work? Partly. The picture part worked after we saw an hour’s worth of on-air fiddling with the slingbox’s control panels. We never did get the audio. No way to tell what part of the signal chain broke there, but I’m guessing it was in the way the cable head-end pre-patched the anticipated feed; short-staffed on a weekend, they were probably running a skeleton crew and heavily automated. Not the best setup to deal with the vagueries of a live incoming feed.

But I gotta hand it to the kids for creativity and for trying, as no other TV station in the market bothered to cover the thing for more than 5 minutes. This is one of the things that makes access TV great and needed.

If it doesn’t have to be strictly live, you could feed a laptop from the firewire output of one of the cameras and FTP chunks back to the station. These would not be live but would have awesome video quality, compared to live stream, and you could run live celphone audio from a reporter under it for the interactive discussions between reporter and anchors.